Walking into my local Radio Shack today to pick up a blank 90-minute audio cassette, I experienced a brief but real pang of anxiety that such things were no longer made—alleviated only when I found the product in question in the area where camcorder cassettes were stored.
PLEASE HELP US GET THE WORD OUT BY LINKING AND TRACKBACKING
The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland, College Park is pleased to be able to offer an immediate residential fellowship available to any one faculty member or ABD doctoral candidate at an institution closed by Hurricane Katrina.
Housed in the campus’s primary research library, MITH is a community of scholars devoted to the application of new media and digital technologies to humanities scholarship and teaching. Projects have typically taken the form of electronic editions, scholarly databases, or high-end teaching materials. See examples here:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/research/index.php
While colleges and universities seem to be moving very fast to accommodate displaced undergraduates, the careers of graduate students and faculty also have to be protected and tended to. We are therefore able to offer a scholar his or her personal workspace, the use of our extensive hardware and software resources, easy access to the university’s library collections (and a base from which to access the unparalleled academic and cultural institutions of the DC area besides), and expert-level consulting about digital scholarship.
While we regret we are unable to offer a stipend, funding is available for temporary relocation and some initial start-up expenses.
To apply, please send a letter of inquiry describing the project to be undertaken (either new or continuing research), a CV, and contact information for three references. Application materials may be sent electronically to mith@umd.edu or by fax to 301-314-7111 or by post to Neil Fraistat, Acting Director, MITH, McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. Consideration of applications to begin immediately. Applications from women and minorities and graduate students and faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities is encouraged.
Neil Fraistat, Acting Director (301-405-5896)
Matthew Kirschenbaum, Acting Associate Director
Carl Stahmer, Acting Associate Director
My earlier “Why I Blog Under My Own Name” figures prominently in “Ivan Tribble’s” latest Chronicle rumination on blogs and academic hiring, “They Shoot Messengers, Don’t They.”
This is an open thread where the discussion under the earlier entry—unfortunately closed due to spam—can continue. I’ll post my own response to Tribble’s latest in the comments here in a bit.
Mark Bernstein, “What Ended.”
Let’s hope he’s right.
As with the days immediately following 9/11 (with which Katrina will inevitably be narrativized and compared) I’ve spent the last week watching enormous amounts of television coverage. The images are unbearable, but so are the sounds, the voices of people in pain. If there’s good to come out of this let’s hope it means that the pendulum now swings back the other way and some perspective and balance is restored to national policies and a national identity which has been so largely defined by the “War on Terror.” Issues of social justice and, for that matter, civic engineering suddenly have a visibility I cannot imagine they would have achieved any other way.
Here’s what’s gonig on in my own small life.
I’m back in the classroom this semester, teaching an undergraduate honors seminar called Technologies of Literature.
My remaining work on my manuscript will be punctuated by the arrival of two major archival sources, making Mechanisms hopefully a book that breaks some news about electronic literature in addition to contributing to the theoretical debate. What constitutes “major archival sources” in the realm of digital media? Stay tuned. (I’ll also be presenting material from the book at MLA in December.)
Work on the nora project approaches its halfway point. We’ve had a series of successful face to face meetings over the summer, and are optimistic about where we are. Various project members are or will soon be out presenting work, so look for us at a conference near you; I’ll be at Elective Affinities in Philadelphia in September, and the University of Maryland’s The Library in Bits and Bytes symposium. Steve will be at MLA.
I’ve taken on my first ever academic administrative role, as Acting Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). My colleague Neil Fraistat has been appointed MITH’s Acting Director for the academic year, and we are joined by Carl Stahmer, a Visiting Assistant Professor, and likewise Acting Associate Director. Carl’s domain is daily operations, mine is event programming and external relations. All of us are friends, and we’re looking forward to working together. You’ll hear a lot more about MITH here in the months to come, I can promise you.
Lastly, this blog. It badly needs a design overall, and a platform migration (I’m looking hard at Wordpress). Not sure when that will happen though, realistically. In the meantime it suits my basic need for occasional postings, and I thank my (six?) readers for keeping the faith and not taking me off their blogrolls entirely.
A statement on the university’s emergency Web site here.
While a university’s first priority must be to accommodate its students—and it’s clear unprecedented steps are already being taken in that regard—I hope the needs of faculty and staff, who depend on a functioning university environment for their livelihood and careers, are also expeditiously addressed.
McIlhenny Company is operating normally and the production of TABASCO® brand products are unaffected by the recent hurricane. Our New Orleans office employees are all accounted for and have been relocated to our Corporate Office on Avery Island, Louisiana.
An upcoming colloquium sponsored by the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin, which has acquired extensive holdings in this most important of Oulilpeans and cybertextualists.
From Wikipedia:
From May 22 preparations for the evacuation began, codenamed Operation Dynamo, commanded from Dover by Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay. He called for as many naval vessels as possible as well as every ship capable of carrying 1,000 men within reach. It initially was intended to recover around 45,000 men of the British Expeditionary Force over two days, this was soon stretched to 120,000 men over five days. On May 27 a request was placed to civilians to provide all shallow draught vessels of 30 to 100 feet (9 to 30 m) for the operation, that night was the first rescue attempt. A large number of craft including fishing boats, fire ships, paddle steamers, private yachts, and Belgian barges, together with Merchant Marine and Royal Navy vessels, were gathered at Sheerness and sent to Dunkirk and the surrounding beaches to recover Allied troops. Some of the vessels came from as far as the Isle of Man and the West Country.
The New Orleans Convention Center is right on the river front, is it not?
Update 9/3: I repeat: Why is the river not being used as the highway into the heart of the city to bring supplies and rescue personnel in, and take people out?
Not a direct victim of Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi bluesman R. L. Burnside died yesterday at age 78. I first got turned onto him when I saw his spot in the documentary Deep Blues back when I was an undergraduate. R. L. (“Rule”) didn’t play it pretty; he was no Buddy Guy or B. B. King—heavy, monotonous drone chords, a low swamp grind that sounded like John Lee Hooker without a certain uptown sophistication. “Jumper on the Line” was the song that made me pick up the guitar, and I spent two years trying, ultimately unsuccessfully, to get me A chords to sound something remotely like his. He recorded with the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, but I always though the act he should be sharing a stage with was Sonic Youth. I’m not kidding.
I only saw him perform once, in Lexington, KY. His signature tagline, “Well, well, well . . .” (so expressive, that) filled the room. R. L. stuff is avaiable from the Fat Possum label, based out of Oxford Mississippi; they’re curretly offline, due, I’m assuming, to the storm. Too Bad Jim is the one I’d start with.